Stronghold of Seven
by ElnaKernor
Summary: Eric Renard managed to bring Nick Burkhardt to France for a little brainwashing. When Nick woke up, though, he wasn't alone in a cell. There was another man there, chained to a wall too. A stranger named Neal Caffrey, who has been a prisoner for years already... and who really'd like to break free. Turns out Nick and Neal have a lot in common.


_Eric Renard managed to bring Nick Burkhardt to France for a little brainwashing. When Nick woke up, though, he wasn't alone in a cell. There was another man there, chained to a wall too. A stranger named Neal Caffrey, who has been a prisoner for years already... and who really'd like to break free. Turns out Nick and Neal have a lot in common._

* * *

 _Sooo... Sure, I already have what, eeerh... 8 stories going on, and I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to update it all but weeell... Perhaps I just need a story for each fandom I'm obsessing over or I can't do it? ( Not possible, I know ). At this point, I believe I should just enjoy the chaos._

 _Anyway;_  
 _This is mostly a Grimm story, main crossover with White Collar, and undertone of Chuck, because, hell, Bryce!Neal is just perfect to throw in the middle of Grimm. And it's totally not to imagine two attractive guys chained to a wall in between beatings ( no, I swear ). There's a story, really._  
 _This first chapter, though, is mostly about establishing the crossover. At the end of season 2 of Grimm, Nick was brought to France by cargo rather than plane, which means his little zombie crisis didn't prevent anything. At the end of season 1 of White Collar, Neal was found out as a grimm, and Adler brought him to the royals, meaning Neal spent 3 years prisoner before Nick's arrival. Chuck is post-everything, obviously, and will only pops out from time to time except for Neal being completely badass when he actually tries._

* * *

 **Chapter 1: This is not the vacation I asked for**

Nick could taste dried blood on his lips.

For the first thing he realized as he regained consciousness, it wasn't exactly reassuring. In fact, the way he was coming back to himself, not in his bed and simply waking up, but more like he had been left to dangle unconscious after having been knocked out badly, it all spelled trouble. Not that Nick wasn't used to trouble. He might be the definition of trouble since his grimm heritage had come into play.

His aunt was killed, Juliette had been in a magical coma from which she had woken up only to forget everything about him, Hank had almost died because of that hexenbeist, Wu too for that matter, his captain had proved to actually be a royal from Austria intent on manipulating everyone, and overall, Nick evaded attempts on his life once a week when he was being lucky.

Nick was a police detective, sure he had signed up for the dangerous job, but not to that point!

Despite all that, though, despite the wesen who all thought he wanted to decapitate them, despite the double life he was forced to live because he knew things no one would believe, Nick smiled bitterly, he couldn't imagine not being a grimm anymore. The dried blood on his lips cracked.

When his grimm abilities had emerged, Nick had firstly been overwhelmed by the radical change in his vision of the world. He hadn't been in any condition to notice it, but now... Time had opened his eyes, you could say.

Being a grimm gave him access to a whole new world, to the truth about wesen and what hides behind the mask. It was a diversity he couldn't imagine living without anymore.

But it wasn't only that. It was more, much more than that.

A grimm, Nick had found out, was faster, stronger than a nomal human, than most wesen even. They healed better than most, had a better sight even without taking into account the fact they could see wesen, were immune to some magical influences, and their fighting skills, without or with any kind of weapons, were basically instinctual. As he had learned after his temporary blindness, his body compensated for any weakness, evolving, almost, into something better, sharper, harder to kill, and remaining so even after the weakness was done with.

He had been these things too, back when he had been only a kehrseite, but not that much. He had been good, but humanly, normally so. Now, his abilities bordered on superhuman, only not that much that it'd be completely obvious.

And Nick had realized after a time, he was feeling complete as a grimm. As if he had had all these possibilities before, but had been kept from getting there, from even noticing them. Being a grimm was normal now. It had always been to him, it's just that he hadn't realized before.

He wouldn't trade his troubled life, not for anything less than saving the lives of others.

Which didn't mean he liked the situation he was in, right now, much.

In fact, Nick didn't like it at all. He could feel the iron shackles on his wrists and ankles, keeping him unable to move, standing up with his limbs almost stretched. Wherever he was right now, his hosts weren't keen on comfort. Not his comfort, at least.

Nick tore his eyes open with difficulty.

"So you're awake..."

He didn't register right away that someone had just talked to him, too busy trying to see something more than blurry lines and spots of light hindering his sight.

"Or perhaps not so much. They really did a number on you, didn't they?"

Nick blinked. Two tears moistened his eyes, and his sight cleared.

There was another man in the room... cell... dungeon... A young man, possibly around his age, in fact, with blue eyes, a sharp jaw, dark brown hair. Closely shaved and clothed in a dark t-shirt and black pants, the whole failing to hide the blue bruises under his left eye and all around his neck. No welcoming smile to speak of, but in the man's situation, Nick wouldn't smile either.

Actually, Nick and the stranger were basically in the same situation, chained to a wall with ancient shackles, the kind you couldn't slip out of if they were put the right way. They certainly weren't about to feel welcomed.

Nick tried to stretch a bit, but his chains only made him fall forward, to be stopped in his fall abruptly. He scowled at the chains, at the wall he could feel behind him, at the cell in general.

"Tell me we don't have to sleep like this."

The other man gave him a wry smile, which Nick didn't like at all. Here he was, stuck in an underground cell if the light was anything to go on, because of...

Because of what exactly?

"How the hell am I here? Where is here to begin with? What happene..."

Oh. Images flashed before his eyes, of running on top of a container, fighting the cracher-mortel, falling down in a container... And then what? Right, the wesen had gotten him. And Nick had fallen unconscious under the cracher-mortel's poison.

He snarled as he realized what had likely happened.

"Freaking royals."

The stranger on the wall opposite chuckled darkly, rattled his chains a bit as if to make a point.

"Tell me about it..."

Nick stayed silent for a moment, simply staring at the stranger, wondering where exactly they were, why the man was here too, if he had done anything to anger the House of Kronenberg.

The other man eventually cleared his throat.

"Neal Caffrey. Pleasure to meet you, but you are...?"

For a moment Nick was tempted to lie, but really, why bother? It wasn't as if his captors didn't know who he was, what he was. Caffrey had nothing to gain by knowing his name, and Nick doubted that, on the off chance the stranger would hate him for one reason or another – read, grimm – the man was in any position to do anything to him. They kind of were tied up right now. Both of them.

That, he figured, had to be bondings circumstances.

"Nick Burkhardt. I don't suppose I could call the hotel staff to complain?"

Neal really looked at the stranger the guards had brought in a few hours before, completely unconscious and very grey, so grey the thief had thought for a moment he was dead. The greyness had receded, and the guy looked much more alive, but he still was covered in scratches and a bruise was starting to show over his right eyebrow. Not that Neal was in a much better state and would dare to compare.

"The staff isn't very friendly around here. Hundjägers, mostly. Or, actually, in two years, no, was it three, now? - in three years I haven't seen anyone else except for visits. And the training, of course. I can't forget the delightful Marie-Catherine Robespierre. Or Adler. Or Hannah Schwartz. And, from time to time, Eric Renard comes by and tell me how disappointed he is that he can't trust me."

Neal shrugged, ignoring the discomfort from the chains. After three years, he had learned not to even think about them. If he did, he'd just kill himself right now. Only, he couldn't even do that.

"So, mostly hundjägers. They don't talk much. And I try not to talk to them much either, because it usually ends with me snarking at them, them punching or kicking me, _et caetera_."

The stranger, Burkhardt, sighed.

"So, we're right in the middle of a castle controlled by the Verrat, for the sake of the House of Kronenberg, probably somewhere in Europe, and the guards are likely to beat us up whenever they feel like it. This is not the vacation I asked for."

Neal snorted a bit. It had been quite a long time since he had had a true conversation which didn't revolve around why he should do what Prince Eric Renard asked instead of being stubborn.

"If it relieve you, when they brought you in, they were in a bad state too. I have no idea what you did to get thrown down here, but the Verrat members didn't like it. _Ergo_ , I'm pretty sure I'd like it."

Burkhardt sighed, reminded of his situation, no doubt.

"I have absolutely no idea, to be frank. I was in Portland when a cracher-mortel came to wreak havoc in the city by creating zombies. He'd spit in his victims' face, and his tetrodotoxin lost them into a trance-like state after some time looking deader than dead. He got me, and I suppose they used the time I was 'dead' to smuggle me out of the USA in a coffin... but I like to think I've reacted badly to the violent stage and it caused them some... discomfort. I... think I was in a container on a ship. I'm not sure. The only thing I remember right now is me kneeing a hundjäger's nose as another one tried to get me shot with... with the cure, perhaps?"

Neal's eyebrows went up.

"What did you do to warrant this kind of trouble, exactly? And first of all, what are you? Laufer, wesen, grimm?"

"If I tell you, will you flee with a terrified scream?"

"I guess grimm, then. And in case you hadn't noticed, I'm a bit tied up right now. I am no flight risk. I should have known, though. None of the others prisoners here are given the same treatment as me, and yet here you are..."

Burkhardt raised an eyebrow at Neal, who went on noting the similarities between them. Roughly the same height, lean and muscular but discreetly so, dark hair, blue eyes, well defined jaw... Though Neal was more on the beautiful side of handsome, while the stranger was more masculine. Damn. Once again, Neal's good looks made him the cute one.

"Grimm too, then?"

Eh, the man was sharp. Neal liked that. Now he just had to determine if Burkhardt was a smart ass too. Perhaps it was a grimm thing. That is, for a grimm who could think by themselves. The other ones he had met so far were a bit too dedicated to the House of Kronenberg. Not that Neal doubted Burkhardt to be one of them. If the stranger was, he wouldn't be here to begin with.

"Unfortunately."

It wasn't completely obvious, but Neal, used as he was to read people, noticed as Bukhardt tensed a bit at the admission. Neal himself couldn't say he truthfully wasn't a little wary of his new... roommate now that he knew him to be a grimm, too. They hadn't exactly the best of reputations, even those who weren't working for the royal families.

The fact that the both of them were stuck in Eric Renard's cell could mean two things – or, really, three, but the second one couldn't be. One, they were both too independent to the royals' taste. Two, they were both too bloodthirsty to be let out, which Neal knew for a fact not to be true on his account at least. Three, one of them was independent, the other was endezeichen.

Nick Burkhardt didn't look like an endezeichen grimm, and Neal liked to think he himself didn't appear as a barbarian either even after three years down here, but the thing with grimms was that they didn't look particularly murderous just because they were grimms. Marie-Catherine Robespierre did look like a model for _Vogue_. When she wasn't, you know, beheading enemies of the House of Kronenberg.

Now, both Neal and Burkhardt being tense around the others could mean they, actually, were both nice people. Only, endezeichen grimms were just as wary of other grimms, whom they thought were betraying their kind... Historically, that is. Neal didn't think there were any endezeichen grimms left in this time.

But an exception could happen...

Burkhardt was the first to speak again; Neal could see the sharpness in his eyes, pushing aside the man's gentle nature.

"Why are you here, Caffrey?"

Neal squinted at him, channeling Bryce Larkin as much as he could. It had been a long time since he hadn't used that particular persona officially, but his dealing with Robespierre, Adler, Schwartz and Eric Renard had forced him to bring out the CIA agent more often than not anyway.

"Bryce Larkin" was very good at appearing cold and uncaring. He irked Robespierre and Renard, and disturbed Adler.

"I could return the question, you know?"

"Of course you could. But it wouldn't get us anywhere if we both play that card, would it?"

Burkhardt was right, of course. It puzzled Neal a bit, though. He wasn't used to being honest, he hadn't been for a long time; here, of all places, being honest wasn't a good thing. Nick Burkhardt, on the other hand, made it look very simple: he was being honest, without giving too much away. And he was good at it.

Neal had been good at it too, long ago. But that was before he started living more than three lives at a time. That was before he heard the truth about his father.

Neal still felt like he should point out the obvious.

"I could still lie to you, then."

Burkhardt gave him a wan smile which quickly turned into a wince, as he probably felt the pain from his bruises settling in. Neal was used to those, now; and not particularly liking it either. But he guessed the other grimm was used to being hurt, anyway. Grimms rarely escaped repeated injuries, unless their name was Neal Caffrey, blatantly ignoring the obvious.

Repeated injuries, ah! Burkhardt hadn't seen anything yet. He hadn't spent months, years in this damned castle.

He'd get used to it, though.

Neal had.

"I'm good at telling liars apart, you know."

Neal knew. Grimms always were good judges of character, especially when they managed to put aside any personal feelings. But Neal was an even better liar.

"And even if I wasn't, what do you have to lose by telling me the truth? Either you don't deserve to be a prisoner, and that's the very reason you are here, or you've been brought down here to get my trust and make me speak, in which case you wouldn't be telling me the truth anyway."

"Fair enough. Now, where do I begin...?"

Burkhardt had the politeness not to answer "by the beginning", probably aware that nothing grimm was easy to explain unless you were endezeichen. Endezeichen grimms had only one very simple story: find the wesen, corner the wesen, kill the wesen.

Neal tried to find a more comfortable position, but there was no comfortable position for someone chained to a wall as tightly as they both were. He knew that, after all this time. He still tried.

"Well, let's start with the current grimms-royals relationship. The House of Kronenberg, and probably the six other families, have only a handful of grimms to do their binding. We are quite rare, and not many of us are more than ghost stories. We like to stay under the radar for obvious reasons. So when the royal families find an unattached grimm... they try to see if they wouldn't be a great asset. The House of Kronenberg has three grimms working for them, a french woman, a german woman, and an austrian man, and the other families have even less."

"There actually are grimms still working for the royals?"

"Oh believe me, you'll see Robespierre and Schwartz soon enough, if you don't believe me. I've never met Rield, though. Anyway, the point is, we are rare, and difficult to catch. I was unfortunate enough to catch the attention of someone interested even before my abilities awakened, and when he found me again... His men noticed I was even more interesting than he had first believed. Hence why I am here."

Burkhardt corrected, as if he could read Neal's thoughts.

"Hence why you have been brought here. Not why you are still here."

" _Touché_. The thing is, Adler is part of a grimm family, but not a grimm himself, and my own family had no 'awakened' grimm in three generations. He shouldn't have noticed me at all... if I hadn't been a rather successful con artist attempting to rob him of the millions he himself was planning to disappear with, not that I knew it at the time."

If he had, Neal wouldn't have even tried to con Vincent Adler. Or, he wouldn't have hesitated at the last moment, if anything. Now he wondered when Adler had made him out, when the older man had realized he was a fake. If Neal prided himself in one thing, it was that whatever he was faking, he faked it pretty well... perhaps better than someone legitimate.

He had been wondering if Adler's perspicacity wasn't, in fact, due to his grimm ascendance.

"Adler wears many different hats, as it is, and he was searching for something I could have helped with. Anyway, he kept an eye on me for years... He's probably the only one who knows one of my false identities got recruited by the CIA, actually."

Burkhardt arched both eyebrows at that. Before the other man could ask, though, Neal continued.

"Agent Bryce Larkin...; don't ask, it sounds good, but it wasn't fun at all. I even died twice because of my brilliant idea to be a star agent. Then I ditched Bryce, my girlfriend disappeared, I escaped of supermax, made a deal with the FBI to work as a white collar CI, got friends... And Adler decided it was time for me to be useful. His men abducted me three years ago, which is when he found out I had become a grimm. Adler thought pleasing the royals was more important to him than countinuing whatever it was that he wanted me to do, and he brought me to Eric Renard. Since then, they've been trying to make me a good soldier and all that. I could have faked my loyalty and escaped, but Adler knows me too well, they realized they had to break me completely... which they haven't been able to do yet, not with my time working for the CIA. What makes me so interesting, my CIA and conman skills, is also what's making it so difficult for them to trust me."

Neal stopped his retelling then, to glance at Nick Burkhardt, fully expecting him not to believe half of what he had just said. A liar who also happened to be a grimm and had supposedly conned the CIA and was now resisting three years in these dungeons because of his morality? Neal wouldn't have believed it himself if someone else had been trying to sell him that particular tale.

The thief was surprised to see in the man's eyes something like acceptance, even if he didn't seem to completely believe him. Burkhardt wasn't trusting him yet, but he was willing to consider he might be telling the truth. He wasn't being naive, no. Just, he seemed able to see more of Neal than the thief had first thought.

"CIA agent, really?"

"Hey, I was reckless when I was young! And it seemed cool, at first. Who never dreamt of being a superspy? At first you don't get what it really means to have to kill someone, even for the greater good. And you don't think anything can happen to you. To others, yes, but not to you."

The other grimm seemed about to retort, but obviously thought better of it.

Neal, suddenly curious of Burkhardt's past, leaned towards his cellmate... or at least, tried. The chains made that attempt rather useless, though.

"What about you?"

There was a moment of silence, during which Burkhardt looked like he was considering the level of honesty he should display. Neal could say, though, that the man had just thrown the precautions out the metaphorical window when he answered.

"I have one of the seven keys the royals want."

Well, that was direct.

Not that Neal knew what the man was talking about.

"One of the seven keys?"

"Never heard that story?"

Neal winced a bit at his revealed ignorance of many grimm-and-wesen things. He knew more than well enough the relationships grimm-royals, but it stopped there. He hadn't exactly had more than a crash course in grimmness, more than happy to stay discreet while working for the FBI.

"Long story short, my grimm abilities only appeared after my second death happened. I think it might not have kicked out at all if my heart hadn't stopped for two whole minutes, for the second time already. There's no exact science about grimms, but the stress and the danger probably triggered it in my case. I completely panicked after my first wesen, who, fortunately for me, was only a mauzhertz, and who somehow explained to me what was going on in between two heart attacks. I checked myself back in jail, where everyone thought 'Neal Caffrey' still was, and it surprisingly proved to be a good way to escape notice as a grimm, since, you know, non-violent prisoners should rather not look anyone in the eyes."

Burkhartd muttered something about it not being that simple, then again maybe it was just him who couldn't help but cross paths with wesen who woged in fright and either accused him of attempted murder, or were the one to attempt murder on him. The truth was, Neal had used his deal with the wardens to the best, staying as much as he could in his individual cell, just in case. The two times he hadn't been able to keep his secret a secret... Let's say channeling Bryce had been very useful to scare the shit out of his fellow inmates as a grimm. They stayed silent about what he was, he didn't drown them in the toilets. Not that he'd have, but they didn't know that.

"The point being, I somehow managed not to be recognized as a grimm after that, either by spotting wesen before they noticed me or by trying not to encourage anger or stress, which could result in a disastrous woge if my interlocutor turned out to be wesen. Or by just walking out whenever something happened involving wesen, if they couldn't actually say who, if not what, I was."

Burkhardt snorted.

"Then I'm just unlucky, I'm sure. Like, how can a police detective avoids situation of extreme feelings? No such luck, eh. 'Sorry sir, but your wife was killed this morni...' and it's happening again. 'No, I won't behead you. No, I was not the one who killed your wife. No, I just want to do my job.'"

"Detective?"

"Yeah... or, I suppose, I was before this abduction. Now I'm a missing detective. Not that I'm complaining, you know. It's not as if they're doing all that just because I happen to have a medieval key which might lead to an old secret treasure the royal families want more than anything."

Neal didn't know what to answer to that. He doubted anything could really be said at this point. And he certainly wasn't the person to go to about hope and getting out of here. Not after three years chained to that wall.

He almost felt glad to have gotten some pleasant company. Almost.

He'd rather talk with Burkhardt somewhere else, preferably with no hundjägers anywhere near. Somewhere without shackles and dungeons. Somewhere where none of his very distant cousins and no princes would try to brainwash him into being a murderous tool.

Neal was pretty sure Burkhardt shared that wish.

They didn't have a choice, though.

Which reminded him he should probably warn Burkhardt about what his life would be from now on, if he was right in his assumption that the other grimm had just been volunteered for the official grimm rehab according to the royal families.

"Listen, if you're going to be treated as I am, you will be out of these chains often enough, but don't think you can just walk out either. There are Verrat agents everywhere in this castle, the prince Eric Renard lives upstairs, and we've probably been microchipped, because the one time I managed to get out, they found me under one hour. And while Renard would be overjoyed to see how resourceful you could be as an asset, he wouldn't hesitate to have you tortured as punishment."

Nick was somewhat startled out of his thoughts by Caffrey's words, which made him realize, again, that he was indeed a prisoner here, and certainly not in a temporary situation. Their discussion so far had kind of made him forget how serious his situation was, but now the full reality of his abuction was coming back to him.

The fact that he had no idea of what had happened to Juliette, to his friends, to the captain wasn't helping. He didn't even know if they were still alive to be worried about his disappearance. What if they hadn't been able to handle the zombies back in Portland? What if Eric Renard had decided it would be cautionary to further go after them, just to make sure they wouldn't attempt anything?

Nick gulped, the irritant shackles heavier on his wrists and ankles.

What had he done to deserve his life to be so thoroughly torn apart?

Nick forced himself to remain calm no matter what. He had to if he wanted to last here. He had no doubt that Caffrey's continued existence and resistance after three years had everything to do with the man's control and nothing to do with Eric Renard's leniency.

So Nick did what he could, and asked for details.

"Advices for survival?"

Caffrey's face turned to stone, eyes dark with unpleasant memories. The man wasn't reaching for his bruises, but Nick could tell it was mostly because the chains were preventing him from doing that.

The other grimm took a deep breath.

"You want to be extra-careful with Marie-Catherine Robespierre, brown hair, grey eyes; not only with the hundjägers. She's the highest ranking grimm, and she'll come by to tell us how foolish and naive we are not to follow the mighty House of Kronenberg. Adler is not someone I like, but he will mostly do 'experiments' to see if you're still alive and to what point you can be useful as a grimm; he's not particularly dangerous. Hannah Schwartz comes in between assignments, to test our combat skills; she's deadly, but not an altogether bad person, which is a dangerous combination for our mental resistance. And please, when the prince comes down here, keep your mouth shut as much as you can. You'll want the bonus points for when you really can't keep it in anymore."

Neal Caffrey had barely finished talking that Nick heard footsteps in the distance.


End file.
